Organizational Burden or Catalyst for Ideas? Disability as a Driver of Cognitive Flexibility and Creativity

Disability is typically perceived negatively, and employees with a disability areviewed as a burden that requires accommodation. We draw from creativity the-ory to challenge this view and propose that disability can make workplace imper-fections salient, can function as a situational cue that increases coworkers’cognitive flexibility, and thus can be a catalyst for creativity. We apply a multi-study, multi-method approach to test these predictions. First, results from time-lagged and objective data in a sample of 7,037 employees from 425 units of alarge German car manufacturer show that units with people with disabilitiesgenerate more ideas, particularly when employees engage in perspective taking.Second, an experiment with 954 employees shows that having a colleague witha disability has a positive individual-level effect on idea generation. Third, weextend these findings with a full model test in a second experiment of 1,314employees, which shows that having a colleague with a disability (compared tonot having a colleague with a disability) leads to more idea generation and higheridea novelty. Increased cognitive flexibility mediates these effects. Together,our findings contribute to the disability, diversity, and creativity literatures byintegrating disability and creativity theory and showing that disability has thepotential to serve as a catalyst for creativity and, ultimately, innovation.